A New Take on the Lawn Mower

Lawn mowers seem like pretty simple machines. There’s a motor on top, deck, wheels, and a blade—easy enough. But what would you do if you were given the task of redesigning the lawn mower? That’s the job the American Lawn Mower Co. and Homelite gave to the team at ID Group (Huntington Beach, CA; idgroup-inc.com). “We have done work for this client in the past, although we worked only on individual pieces, like the knobs and shrouds. But this time, they took the leash off and let us run a bit and we came up with our final design in about four months,” says Jeremy Wilkens, design manager at ID Group.

Homelite’s line of new electric mowers, which recently made their public debut, began with a series of more than 30 sketches, which were narrowed down to ten and then a final three. “We looked at a number of different mowers at places like Lowe’s and Home Depot and we realized that most electric mowers look like toys, but our client wanted something that looked powerful and professional, more like a gas mower,” Wilkens says. The client’s affection for automotive design played a key role in the final form. “The client really likes Corvettes and pushed us to develop a wheel design that looked like car wheels,” says Francisco Hernandez, senior industrial designer at ID Group, who used InDesign and Bunkspeed’s Hypershot 3D rendering software to craft the final design.—KMK